Marketing – first against the wall when the revolution comes

A colleague of mine just received one of those awful marketing calls where the vendor rings *you* and demands your personal information “for privacy reasons” before continuing with the phone call.

*Click*

As a consumer, you must hang up to avoid being scammed. End of story. No exceptions.

Even if the business has a relationship with the consumer, asking them to prove who they are is wildly inappropriate. Under no circumstances should a customer be required to provide personal information to an unknown caller. It must be the other way around – the firm must provide positive proof of who they are! And by calling the client, the firm already knows who the client is, so there’s no reason for the client to prove who they are.

As a business, you are directly hurting your bottom line and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by asking your customers to prove their identity to you.

This is about the dumbest marketing mistake ever – many customers will automatically assume (correctly in my view) that the campaign is a scam, and repeatedly hang up, thus lowering goal completion rates and driving up the cost of sales. Thus this dumb move can cost a company millions in opportunity costs in the form of:

• wasted marketing (hundreds of dropped customer contacts for every “successful” completed sale),
• increase fraud to the consumer and ultimately the business when customers reject fraudulent transactions
• lose thousands if not hundreds of thousands of customers, and their ongoing and future revenue if they lose trust in the firm or by the firm’s lack of fraud prevention, cause them to suffer fraud by allowing scammers to easily harvest PII from the customer base and misuse it

Customers hate moving businesses once they have settled on a supplier of choice, but if you keep on hassling them the wrong way, they do up and leave.

So if any of you are in marketing or are facing pressure from the business to start your call script by asking for personally identifying information from your customers, you are training your customers to become victims of phishing attacks, which will cost you millions of dollars and many more lost customers than you’ll ever gain from doing the right thing.

It’s more than just time to change this very, very, very bad habit.